Shark Freediving

The Two Winners: Nanja coaching Jouke

Today Sanne and I visited another freediving competition. This time Liege, Belgium. It was a pool competition with 3 disciplines and while I thought it would be a small competition it was actually pretty crowded! You can read Sanne his personal story on our Team Sharkbait website.

40 freedivers from 5 countries. 30 men and 10 women made it a good and fast competition. Finally a competition where waiting times were minimized and the pool optimally used. 5 static zones and 4 dynamic zones made sure that waiting times were around 1,5 hours between performances, which was pretty doable!

With the men Jouke van Riel from the Netherlands won the competition with 194,8 points. He did a 6:34 static, 126 meter dynamic with fins and a 106 meter without fins. Close second was Daan Verhoeven, also from the Netherlands, with 193,9 points. Daan did a 5:07  static and the two best performances in dynamic: 109 without fins and 156 with fins, which was only 3 meters less then the current Dutch national record.

With the women Nanja van den Broek was the clear winner with 185,8 points, which was the overall 3rd best total points of the competition. Nanja did a 5:04 static, 141 with fins and 109 without fins. She made it look easy.

Of the 120 performances during this competition, 28 ended with 0 points. Lots of them were zero because people didn’t start in all 3 disciplines. There were 4 disqualifications due to surface protocol errors and no blackouts. There were quite some big samba’s in the pool, mostly during dynamic.  All in all, fun and nice competition with a good atmosphere!

Complete results below, or directly here.